Insider Tip Three: Remember Who Your Target Audience Is

As any good writer knows, one of the most important things to remember when writing an article is this: Who is my audience? Is my audience professionals? Are they adults or children? Are they native English speakers or speakers of English as a foreign language? Are they educated or not?

Once you've narrowed down your target audience, it's important to be consistent in your writing.

One of the problems I often see in audio files that I transcribe for people is not staying on topic. This is intimately tied to who your target audience is.

Many people these days who do teleseminars or webinars tend to do things off the cuff. This makes for very annoying and tedious reading. It causes a lot of grief for transcriptionists, too--believe me!

If your audience are speakers of English as a foreign language, then it's important not to go down a bunch of rabbit trails, using English idioms that are obtuse to this target group, and confusing them by wandering from your topic at hand.

Another related concern is talking down to people or making ones readers feel like they're a bit daft. Some speakers and writers have a tendency to do this. In my personal opinion, writers should always assume their readers are intelligent, concerned about the topic, and have interesting opinions and knowledge of their own to share. This is especially true in certain venues like call-in webinars or teleseminars.

One last thing to remember is try to visualize the person you're writing the article to or doing the teleseminar for sitting there in front of you as you have a personal talk with them on your specific subject matter. That will help you remember your target audience and it will keep you from straying from your topic at hand.

Tired of the Office? The Various Ways Medical Reports Transcription Allows You to Work from Home

Tired of the Office? The Various Ways Medical Reports Transcription Allows You to Work from Home

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Insider Tip Two: Always Make Sure Your Audio Is Top Quality

This area of dictation and recording audio or video is crucial for transcription. I have transcribed many audio files that were barely audible. The worst was some medical dictation in a room full of echoes and someone sneezing and coughing right into the microphone (perhaps the camera person?). I had to listen at full volume, and when the person sneezed or coughed into the mic, my hearing went dead for 15 to 20 minutes each time! I actually lost some of my hearing during the course of transcribing for those people, and that's not worth any amount of payment! Hearing is priceless.

To avoid audio problems, you need to check the following:

1. Do you have the best quality microphones that you can afford? It is worth the investment.

2. How close or far away are the people speaking from the mic? They need to be a comfortable distance away, and this needs to be tested several times in the actual venue before you begin your recording to make sure it's not too soft or too loud and distorted.

3. Turn off phones, alarms, radios, or any other electronic or noisemaking devices so they won't interrupt your recording or obscure the voices. You'd be surprised how many people try to talk over a ringing phone or a room full of people talking, laughing, or shouting.

4. Make sure you're talking slowly and articulately. If your recording is an interview, repeat what the interviewee said for the transcriptionist if you could tell they were mumbling or stumbling. This will help the transcriptionist tremendously.

5. If you're making a video recording, make sure you mic the people who are speaking up close. If the mic is on the video camera, then the loudest person will be the camera person--not always your intention! Using lapel microphones is very helpful in videoing a conference or group, and if you must, pass a microphone around and make sure the person is holding it before they start talking or until they are finished. A common tendency is to let the voice trail off at the end of a sentence, or be passing the mic to the next person while still finishing a sentence. Believe me, it's very difficult to transcribe what that person is saying if they do that.

6. If you're using Voice Recognition Software, the person dictating must have great English speaking skills and a large vocabulary. If they don't, you will get inferior documents full of grammatical mistakes as well as unintelligible words. Accents are a problem with VRS. I wouldn't recommend using this type of software. You will still have to pay a transcriptionist to proofread and edit your transcripts even after they are done. It's just not cost effective.

7. Lastly, just try to remember the transcriptionist when you're recording. Think about how easy or hard it is to hear what you're saying and adjust accordingly. Your transcriptionist will love you for this!

Insider Tip One: Voice Recognition Software versus Transcriptionists

What do hospitals, teleseminar hosts, songwriters, and e-book writers have in common? They all need their audio or video files to be transcribed into excellent documents. Which is better? Is it better to have an expensive voice recognition program that will automatically create documents from your dictation? Is it better to hire a live transcriptionist to transcribe your audio and proofread and edit as they go? That's the question we'll explore here.

I suppose you've heard a lot about voice recognition software, especially with companies like Google marketing Google Voice. There are a lot of people selling this type of software on the Web. The thing that they don't tell you in their sales pitch is, in order to get flawless documents from your dictation/audio is to speak perfectly, with perfect annunciation, perfect grammar, without false starts or "Um" or "You know" or "So..." and then you have to count on the software to work perfectly. The problem is, no dictator is perfect, and no voice recognition software is perfect. Thus, you end up with garbled unintelligible mush that you or someone else has to deal with. In the end, you would be much better off hiring a reasonably priced transcriptionist to transcribe your audio or video perfectly the first time. If you don't, you're paying for very expensive software that doesn't do the job completely, then paying for it to be gone over with a fine tooth comb by a paid transcriptionist for errors. That's just not a good use of your money or time. The answer? Hire a freelance transcriptionist to work for you who has your best interests in mind and who is willing to follow your document needs to the letter. You don't have to use a large corporate transcription service. They're too impersonal and deal with such a large volume of documents that you get lost in the shuffle. Find an IC at home transcriptionist who will work for you personally and be your personal transcriptionist. They aim to please, and you will be delighted at the great quality of work they turn out in record time!

For six other "Insider Tips" see the article below.